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REEDINGS . . .
Notes on Books by
RECALLING EDUCATION
Hugh Mercer Curtler, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Honors
Program at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota, urges us, in Recalling
Education (Wilmington: ISI
Books, 2001), to undertake “a revolution in American education” (p. ix).
Appropriating Thomas Jefferson’s axiom that a nation needs a revolution
every 20 years, Curtler argues that higher education should, above all else, liberate
young people from the various shackles that threaten to imprison them.
Importantly, the liberty he champions, is (as Dostoevsky defined it
“only the mastering of one’s self” (p. 1).
Accordingly, John Locke cautioned us not to allow someone “unrestrained
liberty before he has reason to guide him” (p. 42).
Curtler believes that the educational ‘situation has never been as bad
as it is at present’ (p. 162). Despite
the vast numbers of students and universities, despite the superficial glamour
they exude, ‘Our experiment with higher education, on balance, must be
regarded as one of the great disappointments of the twentieth century’ (p.
162). This is so, in part, because
much ‘education’ has been reduced to ‘schooling’ and ‘job training,’
replete with the acquisition of information rather than understanding.
Accordingly, students now graduate from universities without anything
resembling a ‘liberal education.’
The schools, of course, mouth slogans celebrating ‘multiculturalism,’
‘self-actualization,’ and ‘self-esteem,’ but these are, Curtler
insists, the converse of real liberty, which comes with the cultivation of
character, the discipline of desires, the conquest of irrational instincts.
Education, as the ancient Greeks insisted, should incubate arete:
human excellence. Such cannot
be programmed or indoctrinated, but it can be encouraged.
Educators, as Aristotle said, can provide a positive environment within
which moral and intellectual virtues flourish.
Teaching the right skills, such as reading, and telling the right
stories, illustrating the difference between right and wrong, provide youngsters
with the mental and moral muscles necessary to become excellent human beings.
So, Curtler argues, colleges and universities must recover their main
mission, rooted in the liberal arts. Restoring
required general education courses to one-third of the graduation requirements
(as done by PLNU and other Nazarene universities) would be a major step in that
direction.
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Sharing Curtler’s concern, Richard T. Hughes, in How the Christian
Faith Can Sustain the Life of the Mind (
Some non-Christians know nothing about the Bible; some Christians
know nothing but the Bible. Hughes,
however, argues that ‘dynamic Christian faith requires that we learn to make connections
and to think creatively about the meaning of what we believe.
We call this kind of thinking ‘theology,’ and if we have any hope
that Christian faith might sustain the life of the mind, every Christian scholar
must learn to work as a theologian in his or her own right’ (p. 6).
We’re called to live in two worlds.
Or perhaps we’re called to live in the real world, where neither
secular nor sacred is depreciated.
Hughes thus examines various stances, ranging from the Catholic ‘sacramental
principle’ to the Reformed concern for ‘transformation’ to the
Mennonites’ holism to the Lutheran ‘theology of the cross’ and its
faith/doubt paradoxes. Each approach
has its strengths, duly acknowledged. What
Hughes insists is that one take a stand and address his world from within a
clearly Christian position. As a
member of the
When he describes how he teaches, and the sources he uses, however, it
becomes more clear what Hughes envisions. Paul
Tillich’s theology, he says, enables him to engage students in suitable ways.
Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States he finds
‘profoundly Christian in its orientation, not because the book is written by a
Christian since, of course, it is not. Rather
this book embraces the same ‘upside-down’ values that we have been taught by
the Christian faith’ (p. 121). If
‘upside-down’ means devious and distorted, no doubt Zinn should be used!
Zinn’s radical ‘history’ mentions Pilgrims and Puritans only in
their role as Indian-killers, deletes Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney from
the nation’s story, and generally celebrates socialism (Zinn’s personal
agenda) everywhere. That Hughes
‘embraces’ on one of the most radical, slanted ‘New Left’ history texts
ought give us reason to question his reliability!
When we learn what texts he assigns in his ‘Religion and Race in
America’ class, we grasp how the good professor--earlier opposed to
‘indoctrinating’ students in theology--fervently does precisely that when he
approaches really important issues such as racism.
Christian doctrines must be dealt with dispassionately--or even dutifully
doubted. But on issues such as race
prejudice there can be no questions! Finally,
we’re urged to duplicate the ‘passion’ of Chris Lovdjieff, a San Quentin
inmate who so impressed his fellow inmate, Eldridge Cleaver, that he called him
‘The Christ.’ Given Cleaver’s
subsequent trajectory, one rather wonders how his jailhouse teacher provides us
a model for emulation. How what
Hughes does with all this, claiming to stay rooted in a cogently Christian
worldview easily eludes me!
From Lovdjieff in prison, we segue to Parker Palmer’s treatise, The
Courage to Teach, with its Quaker concern for the ‘Inner Light’ and a
‘circle of seekers’ gathered together to discuss ‘great things.’
We ‘teach who we are,’ Palmer says (p. 145), and Hughes agrees.
He’s teaching himself, properly clad in Tillich, Zinn, and Eldridge
Cleaver!
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Robert Benne, a professor of religion at
Benne admits that virtually all Christian colleges, in time, slip away
from their denominational ties and theological commitments.
Certain trajectories, such as declining numbers of students and faculty
from the sponsoring denominations, the shunting aside of chapel, the elevation
of humanitarian service projects over personal piety, and the loss of a clearly
articulated theological vision, generally reveal this secularizing process.
But the process is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
What Benne wants to discover, in the ‘premier’ institutions he
studies, is the secret to keeping Christian colleges Christian.
Benne provides us with positive models--especially Calvin and
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Rather than lamenting the demise of liberal education, Jeffrey Hart
reveals how it should be done in Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe:
Toward the Revival of Higher Education (New Haven:
Yale University Press, c. 2001). He’s
now Professor Emeritus, of English at
Hart’s persuaded that, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, ‘A people that
no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul’ (p. vi).
Educators’ great task, Hart insists, is to help coming generations
remember. College professors,
especially, must sustain the memory of the great works which anchor the grandeur
of Western Civilization. Quoting one
of his own influential teachers, the philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, he
asserts that education should enculturate citizens--and “a citizen is a person
who, if need be, can re-create his civilization” (p. ix).
Western Civilization developed, Hart holds, as a result of the creative
tension--a dialectic--between
First Hart discusses (by carefully reading their texts) Homer and Moses,
two heroic figures who tower over
Then come Socrates and Jesus, who internalized the heroic attributes of
their progenitors. Socrates, Plato
shows, ‘internalized the Greek heroic tradition that came down to him as
refracted through Homer. The heroism
of the battlefield and the pursuit of arete became heroic philosophy and
the pursuit of truth, even at the cost of life itself.’
Four centuries later, ‘Jesus radically internalized the heroic
tradition of the patriarchs, Moses, and the Prophets, refining it to an intense
concentration on the inward condition of holiness, anchoring the older Law in
the purified soul’ (p. 73).
Hart gives extensive, perceptive attention to Jesus.
His words, recorded in the four gospels, are ‘eloquent, memorable,
often mysterious. Into the world of
the narrative voices there comes this entirely different voice.
. . . . What this seems to
show is that Jesus could not have been created as a fictional or semifictional
character even by men who were close to him but virtually had to be part of a
recollection they shared, however derived, of an extraordinary person.
Those who wrote the narrative prose could not have imagined the man who
spoke as their central figure’ (p. 89).
Above all else, Jesus calls us to holiness.
‘Jesus wants not only good behavior but a radical purification of
being’ (p. 95). ‘We begin to
grasp Jesus’ goal for all of us: the
condition of holiness in which the inner self is so disciplined, so perfect,
that no stain can possibly adhere to it’ (p. 96).
This call shines forth most clearly in the Sermon on the Mount.
Indeed, Hart wonders, ‘Might it not be that the state of perfect
holiness that Jesus asks for in his Sermon on the Mount resembles the mind of
God encountered in Genesis?’ (p. 97). Yes,
indeed: ‘What Jesus does in his Sermon on the Mount is concentrate the theme
of holiness that can be found in the Hebrew Bible, concentrate it to a sharp
point and, as he says, ‘fulfill’ it. It
could be argued that the Hebrew Bible in its deep structure yearns for
fulfillment in such a hero as this, who embodies the triumph of holiness in word
and act’ (p. 101).
Drawing together
To illustrate Hart’s approach, note his note on Dante.
‘The souls in Dante’s Inferno are not placed there by some external
agency, throwing them into jail against their wills.
In fact they go willingly to the location in Hell appropriate for them.
They had chosen their Hell while still alive.
Their wills never turned against their choice.
Dante often speaks in his poem of the ‘sweet world’ and gives many
examples of it in his similes. Those
in Hell lost this sweet world while they were in it through the distortions of
their actual choices, their defective wills.
In external appearance, while in the world, they might have been handsome
or fair, and prosperous and powerful, but internally they had turned away from
the sweet world and also from their highest good.
Their destiny in Hell, as Santayana says, ‘is just what their passion,
if left to itself, would have chosen. It
is what passion stops at, and would gladly prolong forever.’
In Hell, to put it another way, they achieve the ideal form of what they
had willed all along without ceasing to will it’ (p. 152).
The book’s title is somewhat misleading, for it exudes thanksgiving for
the riches of the Western tradition, relished by a thoroughly experienced
scholar who puts it in the best light. However,
in his ‘Afterword,’ Hart ventures to explain the ‘cultural catastrophe’
responsible for crushing liberal arts education.
When he began his studies, as an undergraduate at
And indeed they were. Now
hosts of ‘critics’ deconstruct rather than interpret.
Ever alert to various villains, ‘Their own tone is often snarling and
accusatory. Needless to say, the
villain always turns out to be variously white, male, Western, racist,
imperialist, sexist or homophobic--or, with luck, all of them together.
The result of this is not literary experience but an endless repetition
of slogans and cliches’ (p. 246). Consequently,
students rarely receive the ‘education’ they deserve.
And yet . . . and yet there’s hope!
Hart ends his treatise with an enconium to Chaucer’s ‘clerc,’ the
scholar who forfeited food in order to buy a set of Aristotle’s works.
Of studie took he most cure and most hede.
Nought o word spak he more than was neede . . .
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche.
And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche. (p. 249)
So
be it! However desperate things
appear, we need clercs of Chaucer’s stripe.
He gladly learned and taught. So
it is indeed possible, even necessary, to smile and go on teaching--amidst the
cultural catastrophe.